Stephen Husarik

Professor of Humanities and Music History

Stephen Husarik is a professor of humanities and music history at UAFS and serves as head carillonneur for the university. He attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, the University of Illinois and the University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D.

Husarik worked at several colleges in the Chicago area before coming to UAFS in 1992 when it was still Westark. Husarik studied musicology with Nicholas Temperley and Albert Luper, and piano with Soulima Stravinsky and John Simms.

In addition to reading dozens of papers at national and international conferences, Husarik has authored and/or contributed to over half a dozen books and nearly thirty articles in the areas of music and humanities. He recently published a textbook in 2014 titled “Humanities Across the Arts.” He has served as co-editor of “Interdisciplinary Humanities” for the Humanities Education and Research Association since 2008 and recently edited an issue entitled “Online Humanities.” He has a particular interest in the music of Beethoven and has published articles on the composer in The Musical Times, the Journal of International Humanities and Speculum Musicae.

Husarik has received the Whirlpool Master Teacher Award, the Arkansas Distance Education Teaching Award, and other local, national and international awards for his publications. He was the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities and college teacher fellowships to the University of Maryland, Harvard University, New York University and Bayreuth, Germany. In 2012, he received the "Research, Scholarship and Creativity Award" from UAFS, which recognizes full-time faculty members for their research achievements.

Topics

Inexpensive Travel around the World

Husarik has traveled from Beijing to St. Petersburg, from Cairo to Hadrian's Wall, and from the Rock of Gibraltar to the French Alps. He has traveled on federally supported fellowships with professional colleagues and students, as well as on guided tours. He has traveled by air, ship, train, sailboat, row boat, funicular, gondola, vaporetto, tram, subway, bus, car, limousine, taxi, elevator, rickshaw, donkey and camel and will share his experiences from his travels over the past 30 years. He will help you decide what you should eat, where should you stay, how to find the best way to get from one city to another, how to decide if you take a guided tour, travel independently, or use the services of a travel agent. Using entertaining examples, Dr. Husarik will have you laughing about his countless experiences traveling to foreign countries as he collected thousands of photographs for use in his humanities textbook.

Beethoven and the Baths: The Struggle for Personal Survival

Ludwig van Beethoven received many therapies before he wrote a suicide letter to his brothers from the spa-suburb of Heiligenstadt, Austria. Although terribly depressed about his hearing loss and nearly giving in to his depressive thoughts, the composer decided to continue the fight against his hearing disability with medical treatments at therapeutic facilities throughout Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. Beethoven tried everything from electro-shock stimulation and blood-letting, to bitter medicines and bathing. A practitioner of the Hygiene movement, Beethoven and his doctors thought that immersion in certain types of waters could cure his disease. Ironically, the final so-called cure given to him on his deathbed was to place Beethoven in a covered tub containing hot water and birch leaves as a kind of portable sauna. This presentation will explain the types of baths available to Beethoven in Vienna, who visited them and what treatments were considered standard medical practice at the time. It will also explain how the class system may have hampered Beethoven’s visits to some of the smaller establishments.

Humanities Across the Arts: The Process of Conception, Publication and Practice

Dr. Husarik has taught more than eight thousand humanities and music students over the course of his career and he recently published a new textbook entitled Humanities Across the Arts (Kendall Hunt, 2014). Two years in the making, Husarik explains how he conceived of the content, how he applied his own point of view to the subject matter, and how he was helped at various stages of the process. The finished book was positively reviewed in Interdisciplinary Humanities--the journal of the Humanities Education Research Association, presented to a national organization of Humanities instructors, and is currently used by UAFS student in the General Humanities curriculum. This presentation provides some historical background and anecdotal excerpts from practical exercises in the book. One of these exercises includes the measurement of “Golden Section” proportions in Ancient Greek statuary. Participants will leave the session knowing how to measure “Golden Section” proportions in their own bodies and how that informs our general views of beauty today.